During these months of August and September 1956, the work was now at least a little circulated and talked about. News soon arrived that a Neville Armstrong of the publisher Neville Spearman Ltd. indeed would be interested to look into considering to publish The Ginger Man in England. The book also came to the attention of a Keidrick Rhys, a Welsh literary person working on The People Sunday newspaper and who wrote a column for its Welsh edition. Rhys, who founded a literary magazine, was one of the first ever to publish a poem by another Welshman, Dylan Thomas. But now the momentum was fast increasing, with suddenly crucial now the fact that a piece of mine published in the Manchester Guardian had been chosen to be reprinted and read by children in a volume used as a text in modern secondary schools. And this matter in concert with The Ginger Man and its list of dirty books published in Paris interested The People newspaper, to whose offices I was invited.
Rhys assured me that his interest in writing about The Ginger Man was of an entirely literary nature. However, as one was to find, he was also a gourmet. And while nearly licking his chops and with yours truly, his Paris pornographer, in tow, Rhys showed his editor the list of dirty books in the back of The Ginger Man and asked if he might call Rules, the restaurant, to make a booking for lunch. The editor read the list, looked at me and agreed to the expense. And so at this old established eatery in Covent Garden, my first paid-for entertainment as an author was about to take place. Rhys tucking in his napkin over duck à l’orange and a vintage bottle of Burgundy. There were crepes suzette and equally splendid jolts of brandy accompanied by delicious coffee to drink us back to our senses. We sat eating merrily away till nearly four o’clock. And now returned to the newspaper office, Rhys, who had already written much of his interview, now concluded it and, with it typed, further presented it, along with his gigantic lunch bill, to the editor. It did not take long for this gentleman to look up from his desk with a grimacing and disapproving face. Following which Rhys vanished and did not reappear.
As I sat waiting out in this large outer room of desks and reporters, I was suddenly confronted by a tall, quite distinguished-looking Australian. Whose no-nonsense words were now shot out at me like lethal bullets from a gun. And who, as he pulled up a nearby chair, swung his legs and feet up to rest on the edge of a desktop.
“Hey, what’s this business about this dirty book of yours you’ve published in Paris with the Olympia Press.”
“It’s not a dirty book.”
“Well, you tell me what it is, then.”
This tall gentleman was Murray Sayle. A journalist who I was to later learn was already famed in Australia. And like many from that country, who’d made their mark in their native territory, he had come farther afield to again achieve celebrity in what was then thought to be the mother country. One immediately got the impression that Sayle was trying to break through what his editor saw as a defense and disguise to my being engaged in the dirty book trade. A trade that The People newspaper regarded as fair game to expose and bring to the attention of the police and director of public prosecutions. And Sayle’s words, although disarmingly mild and even friendly, were relentless in their probing into what he clearly felt continued to be my cover for this prosperous activity of purveying porn and known to be much alive and thriving under certain booksellers’ counters in many a British city and which The People newspaper especially let it be known they would expose and stamp out. There was no doubt that despite the wonderful lunch, Rhys still wanted to keep his literary conscience clear and stand by his representations to me. However, the article he had written, one was told by Sayle, had been met by his editor’s predictable reaction.
“Hey, you’re praising this guy. Get to the bottom of this guy. We can’t have innocent children reading the work of a dirty book writer in Paris.”
Rhys, albeit well fed, was extremely apologetic that he had his favorable article put aside. And clearly Murray Sayle had replaced him on the job of what now was an investigative matter with Sayle’s interest in my story continuing as six P.M. now approached and he invited me to go with him to a nearby pub. Sayle looking and probing for holes in my story but also seemed to be impressed by my continuing adamant affirmation that I was a genuine writer whose work was of literary merit. I was also finding Sayle’s intelligent company equally strange and deceptive. No longer interrogating, he became a generous host as we drank a few beers and he was actually listening to what I said. Along with an Australian associate, he invited me back to Notting Hill Gate and his flat up three floors in Palace Gardens Terrace and looking out back on part of the Russian embassy. Populated with a stunningly beautiful girl, a mastiff dog and a couple of Australian friends, as the beer flowed and canapés were passed about, his gramophone was soon playing and thundering out for perhaps the first time in England the composer Carl Orff’s music. This was an entirely new breed of mankind. Intelligent, tough, erudite, without English social snobberies and pleasantly letting you know it as they called each other digger, a favorite Australian cognomen to denote comradeship. And Sayle, after our evening at Palace Gardens Terrace, had pronounced,
“Based on my judgment of men, so far, I believe your story. But based on the ways of the world, I’d feel happier if I could know a few more facts.”
Back in Fulham, I’d told Eddie Connell about my brush with The People newspaper and how now my concern existed over what might turn out to be an exposé of me as a dirty book writer for the Olympia Press. But that I had met both a literary man and an intelligent Australian journalist to whom I was attempting to let know the truth of the matter and that the story, if one there was, I felt would be fair and factual. But Connell immediately cautioned me: “Mike, from my knowledge, The People, once they get on to a story, they never let go and they pursue it to its ruthless end. And believe me when I say they are not in the business of painting a flattering picture of an author whose work is published along with the likes of The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe.”
Again Connell reminded me of the plight of Oscar Wilde, who, when released from prison, had finally to flee to the continent for good to escape British persecution and opprobrium. And now as if by design, I seemed to be provided by Girodias with all the ingredients to enable me to be described as a pornographer and a dirty book writer and to be about to suffer exposure and endure the first pitfalls and to risk prosecution for having written The Ginger Man. The fact that I’d been published in Punch and the Manchester Guardian could mean now only that here was a pornographer posing as a literary type and who assumed such disguise as a protection, which the headline due to appear in The People would soon widely disavow. For as a Sunday newspaper whose circulation was in the millions and whose readers were in the many millions, and which was required reading by the underworld as well as all law enforcement agencies, I was sure to undergo more than just a little of ridicule and contempt.
“MOTHERS AND FATHERS, DO YOU WANT YOUR
CHILDREN TO READ THE WORK OF A
DIRTY BOOK WRITER?”
And as I dreaded, indeed, the worst was about to happen. According to Rhys, who regretted the development, The People newspaper was planning to use exactly such a headline. And a further reaffirming urgent message reached me at Broughton Road from Eddie Connell, who, in inquiring of his underworld contacts, now informed him that I was indeed to beware of The People newspaper, as they were well and truly after me. And, as befitted the sensational nature of the story, had put their ace reporter on the job. Anguish on all sides. Trust no one. And of course it did not help to have recently read a biography of Oscar Wilde. Fame now at long last imminent. But to be accompanied by arrest, prosecution and imprisonment and immersion in a bath of shameful ignominy. In mildly befriending me, Sayle, for this public crucifixion, was also presumably reading the book and finding out more about the Olympia Press. And I of course was imagining even grimmer headlines.
“PORNOGRAPHIC PEN–WIELDING
DIRTY BOOK
WRITER CAUGHT
FILTHY HANDE
D
ESCAPING AT
DOVER”
A day or two passed, during which I walked the miles away much depressed but not totally in a state of fatal despair, but, living through what I thought were to be my last moments in Fulham before I made my escape across the channel to France. And worst above all now, a gloom and doom descending with the awareness that no British publisher, once The People newspaper had written its exposé, would dare publish The Ginger Man in Britain. As was my wont in such dilapidated spirits, I had wandered the dismal, empty isolation of the streets around the Fulham Gas Works. Staring into the grime and grit of the streets over which I walked along Sand’s End Lane and Imperial Road. Then emerging through Harcourt Terrace and down Bagley’s Lane, I could come to the more cheerful open space and grass of Eel Brook Common. Here, in from the traffic of New King’s Road, I chose a bench with my back facing Musgrave Crescent, where I had always thought it would have been pleasant to live in such houses facing a few trees, and in front of which I had often sat in reverie and pleasant daydreaming, which on this solemn evening only seemed to conjure up dread and another headline.
“ESCAPING PORNOGRAPHER
IN DISGUISE
CAUGHT COWERING
IN CROSS CHANNEL
SHED”
It was Thursday at just past six P.M. By Friday sometime Murray Sayle would have scratched his head for the last time and the story would be written. And by Saturday the printing presses of The People newspaper would begin to whine and then begin to roar and finally thunder as the bound bundles of print slammed down on the loading piers and were shoved into lorries and heaved on trains. And through the night would be all over England, Wales and Scotland to be ready on Sunday morning to be brought into households all over Britain. If they hadn’t already got me in handcuffs in bed that night, by Monday the latest, Broughton Road would be full of the vice squad, and, with curtains twitching and fingers of the neighbors wagging, I would be hauled across the pavement into a squad car to face oblivion. And worse, leave a young family of two children minus a father who left them to be ridiculed in headline disgrace.
“PARIS
PORN PURVEYOR
CORRUPTING YOUNG
ARRESTED”
Having before me the soon approaching Sunday, I was already wondering what to pack, thinking it best to gather sparse luggage to accompany me with an apple, orange and banana on the train ride to Dover. Once on the ferry I’d be at least half safe and could have the orange. Then halfway across the channel have the apple. And finally reaching what could be temporary respite and shelter in France, I could eat the banana. And there in that country, with the work not yet translated into French, I would for sometime at least be free of prison bars, affording me a chance to continue to fight the battle of The Ginger Man. But then according to Behan and now according to Connell, even if the worst did happen, the standard of accommodation and the library facilities of Her Majesty’s prisons were not half bad and in befriending your better class of criminal, introductions to whom they would readily provide, much influence could be wielded and much additional physical and intellectual comfort was available.
Meanwhile, as I sat in the gathering darkness of Eel Brook Common suffering my growing sense of intimidation and keeping an eye open around the park for the gathering forces of The People newspaper henchmen, who were noted for their fearlessness in tracking down the guilty, and just as Connell predicted to happen, I was already feeling that I should now, prudently, before it was too late, be making for Victoria Station on the number 11 bus that passed nearby. And not be physically present while I and the Olympia Press were at last being brought to book before the righteous population of Britain, who were to be richly entertained with this exposé of dirty books. Being able to imagine getting into The Enormous Bed, or joining the School for Sin, or feeling the lash of The Whip Angels, or squeezing their thoughts between White Thighs, or last but not least, fantasizing on The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe. And let me tell you, the gossipy residents of Broughton Road would especially be gloating.
As darkness had nearly descended over Eel Brook Common, I could hear the hammering of the final nail in the coffin of The Ginger Man and the lid sealed over what now promised to be the remnants and tatters of my life. I was on the verge of making up my mind to escape, as Connell had already suggested I should, and that he would get me a phony passport and could send word down the criminal grapevine to have someone hide me out overnight in Newhaven or Dover before I caught the boat. And at that moment, as I considered this prospect, and was already deciding that I would instead stay and fight, a shadowy figure had entered the otherwise empty park and was directly approaching me across the grass. From the menace of this large shadow and the purposeful walk, it looked at least like a detective inspector of some special criminal venereal vice squad. Size in an adversary had never particularly perturbed me and in fact I took a suicidal interest in such contest and was already contemplating sending this approaching brute’s trilby hat flying and laying him out with one punch. But then surely I’d have to run for it back to Broughton Road, collect luggage and a few sandwiches Valerie could hurriedly make me and head for Victoria Station. But now the converging figure was nearly upon me. And was, in fact, Murray Sayle.
“Your wife, J.P., said if I looked around, I would no doubt find you sitting here in the park.”
Sayle was well known, according to Connell, to be a man not to be intimidated nor deterred from tracking down quarry as a reporter. Nor indeed was he any slouch in a fight. Nevertheless, I felt my muscles relax and glacial calm settle over me as I awaited provocation to spring to the attack. But Sayle’s voice was friendly enough. He was clearly stunned to find me in the twilight sitting alone in the empty park and asked if he could sit down. He seemed to think that I must be waiting for someone and asked how long I had sat there. When I said I was waiting for no one and would perhaps sit for an hour or two, he voiced surprise at my reclusiveness.
“Your wife, Valerie, told me that this is where I would probably find you. I’d like to accompany you back to Broughton Road and have a talk. But first I want to give you my opinion about this book of yours. I’ve read it twice. It’s a work of literary distinction. In fact, when I first read it, I thought it one of the best novels I’d ever read. On second reading, I figured it was the best novel I’d ever read. And in my opinion, in no sense is it a dirty book and had no business to be published among the work listed at the back. You’re a genuine writer. As far as I’m concerned, the story is dropped.”
“I’ve been told by a friend that The People newspaper never drops a story.”
“They’re dropping this one. They’re going to be told there is no story. You have my word on it.”
After these sentiments were exchanged, I walked with Sayle back to Broughton Road, where, at the nearby off-license shop, he bought a half bottle of Bell’s whiskey, for us an unusual luxury. As Philip played noisily till his bedtime and Karen already lay asleep, Sayle sat in our kitchen room, revealing a large and sensitive awareness about literary matters. He talked of the formation of sentences and the abbreviation of language and of the distinctive style in which he thought The Ginger Man was written. He enthusiastically quoted lines and laughed recalling incidents from the book. The transformation from what I had imagined was a tough investigative journalist and ogre pursuing me, into a man of learning and culture who confidently expressed his opinions over the worth of The Ginger Man, brightened the bleak darkness of my recent days. But upon telling Connell of the evening with Sayle, he immediately cautioned me that it was a trap. Which would close upon me the coming Sunday morning when The People newspaper hit the newsstands and I would more than deeply regret that I wasn’t already halfway across the English Channel to France.
However, I stood firm and took and trusted Sayle’s assurance. And Sunday came. When The People newspaper was opened, there was no mention of me, The Ginger Man nor the Traveller’s Companion Series. For like many of th
e ancient Manx from whom he descended, Sayle was true to his word.
And now
I lived to fight
Another day
While not knowing
There would be
More than
Nine thousand
Of them
38
AUTUMN OF THE YEAR 1955. And five months since The Ginger Man was published in Paris. It was becoming time to confront one’s nemesis in his lair. I was armed with only the vague possibility that The Ginger Man would find a publisher in England. But there seemed some hope in the air. The world silence over the novel’s publication was at least breached here and there with sounds made by its few readers who recommended it should be read.
And now, instead of fleeing in the previous manner I thought would befall me, I sedately departed by train, boat and train to reach this long-famed city and the Gare St.-Lazare. By the familiar garlic scent of the Métro, I traveled to the Latin Quarter to a room up two flights at the small Hôtel Square in rue St.-Julien-le-Pauvre and overlooking its little park. This district, from Trinity days still familiar to me as I crossed boulevard St.-Jacques and traversed the narrow alley of rue de la Huchette. As one maneuvered a crowded place St.-Michel, it was now as it always seemed, full of students. I proceeded along rue St.-André-des-Arts, where Valerie and I stayed for our summers in Paris and which street entered the notorious junction converging in carrefour de Buci. Here on my first ever visit I was told by Jim Walsh, a Trinity scholar, that I would be awakened that very next morning by an enormous collision of cars. And indeed, just as daylight dawned, five cars crashed into each other, making for a chaotic shambles and hysterical shouting match between the gesticulating drivers.